Politics & Power Quote by Don Nickles

Nickles sets a trap for the listener: accept his premise, or be branded indifferent to national survival. By opening with "If you really believe", he frames skepticism as naivete, even bad faith. The line is less an argument than a loyalty test, engineered for a post-Cold War, pre-9/11 America where missile defense was both a technological fantasy and a political talisman. It’s a classic security-politics move: define the government's "number one priority" as protection (who can dispute that?), then treat any vulnerability as moral failure rather than strategic reality.

The subtext is doing heavy lifting. "Defenseless" is absolutist language, designed to short-circuit the messy truth that defense is never total, deterrence is part of defense, and risk is managed, not eliminated. "Not acceptable" reads like common sense, but it quietly smuggles in a demand for expensive systems and aggressive doctrine without naming tradeoffs: cost, feasibility, arms-race dynamics, or the possibility that missile defense can destabilize relations by undermining mutual deterrence.

Context matters because Nickles was a Republican senator at a moment when the party was pushing hard for national missile defense and casting arms-control skeptics as soft. The quote’s intent is to convert a technical debate about probability, engineering, and treaties into a visceral story about helplessness. It works because it turns policy into posture: protection becomes identity, and doubt becomes disloyalty.